Gabrielle Goliath

“I appreciate your note on the centrality of bodily presence and situated knowledge, which is key to the political, poetic, affective and conceptual impetus of the work, as it calls us into a different, more relational aesthetic encounter. It is, however, important to recall that not all “bodies” are equal, or equally “believable”, and do not enter into political representation on commensurate terms. An (anti-black/brown/poor/femme) index of differentially valued life continues to sustain an inequitable regime of representation, one in which white heteronormativity reads (and reads well) whilst the “affectable others” (to cite Denise Ferreira da Silva) do not.”

Art Frame Interview read

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Roulette

Multimedia sound installation
2014

According to data released by the South African Police service from 2017/18, a woman is murdered every 3 hours in South Africa.*

In Roulette, a stream of amplified static is punctured once every 3 hours by an ear-ringing recording of a point-blank revolver gunshot. Stepping onto the domestic ‘welcome’ mat, those who risk listening-in open themselves to a more embodied, implicating and potentially harming relation to this statistical abstraction of feminine death.

* Statistic corroborated by Africa Check, an independent non-partisan organisation. When the artist first exhibited Roulette in 2014, the statistic sat at a woman murdered every 6 hours, according to a National Study of Female Homicide in South Africa (MRC Policy Brief). The original 6-hour audio track has been adjusted to 3 hours to reflect the more current statistic.

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image credit: Roulette, 2014, multimedia sound installation, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris (2021)